It was a dark time.. University as we know it was coming to an end. The time had flown so quick, and now the pressure was on. Three years of lectures, and monkeying, all leading up to a final climax.. Would we pass the final exams? Well, yes. We’re not stupid enough to waste our time at University, we work as hard as we play. Still the pressure gets pretty harsh when it comes down to it.. Taking it from the perspective of a movie though..

The End is coming..

..but we have gained experience with plastic weapons

Much had happened in the past 3 years. Allan got his treasured Ninja suit, there’d been an organised stealth flourbomb attack on the university student panel, Allan got beaten about the living room (a lot), but most importantly we were to leave our home and our friends..

Flourbombed sabbaticals

We gained more plastic weapons

We got Allan a Ninja Suit (Why God, why?)

We had far too many Kinder Disappointments

Revise or Die celebrates the epic struggle and adventure of a small renegade band of students against the grade..

The video is in the style of a movie trailer, but don’t be fooled by the “Coming Soon” at the end. It’s just to compliment the trailer atmosphere.

It’s what appears to be a random collection of bits and peices salvaged from the depths of my camcorder archives and mixed together into a strange digitial video synced to theme music from an anime series and generally representing a year’s worth of living with the person we know as Allan.

The footage itself comes from a failed attempt at making our own spoof movie, amongst other things. A few scribbled ideas in the back of a drawing pad during a particularly boring recap lecture formed themselves into a wonderful idea in our weak little minds, and we decided to do it.

Without storyboards or anything

Without any dialogue planned.

It was painful.

At any rate the garbage we did randomly collect on my stack of 8mm camcorder tapes piled up, and we ended up capturing it all to a buggy MPEG4v3 codec (this was before DivX ;-) was around) which made things pink and green at random times and the noisy analogue tapes really made it look awful.. Colours bled all over the place. Even so we stuck it on some cdrs and tried to forget it ever happened.

Random boredom struck and 7 Hours later, with breaks, Allangelion was complete, beatmatched, synced and with some fancy transparent overlay effects. First premiered at a LAN party held by a friend of Allan’s, he’s both hated and treasured it since.

Later I tried to find the source files for it to recompile it as high a quality as I could, but found it’d been corrupted.. grr.. a huge MJPEG compiled copy was the best we had, so that’s what was used when remaking Allangelion with the all new rotoscoped shiny lightsaber effects. As a side effect, somehow scenes with lightsabers in seem blurry compared to the original, a major annoyance.. In the end I finally managed to get as best as I could by mixing the MJPEG copy with as much of the source as possible while overlaying the blurry version using a couple of filters to basically only overlay the bright areas (the lightsabers) so it kept the original sharpness. Now with a couple of extra touches it looks just that little bit better